Beckers' automotive plastic coatings business serves OEMs, their subcontractors and component manufacturers with styling support and coatings for automotive interiors and exteriors.
Durable colour for a world on the move — by Beckers
Styling and coating plastic in the automotive industry
Competition and technology have combined to drive the design of automotive plastic components from minor functional parts to major aesthetic elements.
Coatings and surface effects play an increasing role. They are the final articulation of the design brief — from retro luxury to minimalist sporty, from "family room" MPV to compact city car. Surface colour, texture and effects move the design impact through functional to sensual. Coating styling helps upwardly mobile brands build luxury images — and enables established brands to carve new niches or respond to international variation in taste.
While the coatings scene has been changing, automotive component suppliers have radically increased the scope of their work, from supplying simple sub-components manufactured locally through supply of completed assemblies to multinational integrators with substantial design input.
This multinational spread means that it is important to work with a coatings supplier who can supply OEMs and their subcontractors with consistent coatings wherever they are located.
New technologies and new industrial structures offer new opportunities for competitive advantage. Beckers’ automotive plastic coatings business works in partnership with OEMs to develop their competitive advantage.
Beyond colour
Colours are easily specified with systems such as Pantone or NCS. The trick is to be able to fix the colour and marry it to the "right" effect. The same bright red can be everything from cheap looking plastic, to a sophisticated, deep and dandy effect, or smooth as a peach....
By using colours, effects and tactile feelings you might achieve exciting and tempting sensations such as:
- Silky smooth, shiny but still conservative soft leather.
- Vibrant and juicy, classical sporty colours with a rubber, leather or ceramic feel.
- Shimmering pearls with rough leathery or coarse texture — either as a visual effect or enhanced using surface structure.
- High gloss on leather or soft feel gives exclusivity to simple, solid and conservative colours like brown, black and grey.
- Colours that change in light, heat or dark, colours that light up and sparkle like fireworks when hit by the sun.
No expression is sacred, no description is wrong!
Becker Industrial Coatings Colourstyling
Working together with Becker's colour stylists in creating allows you, the automotive designer, freedom to use your ideas, pictures and materials as creative input. We are there to help translate your visions into paint. What's your target? The upper middle-class family man when he is purchasing his new car? Young singles just buying their first car? The budget driver with a thin wallet but a good eye for class and quality? It's all in the communication, from designer, to colour stylist, to the market.
At the same time, Becker Industrial Coatings' colourstyling concept is totally practical. It recognises that coatings must also avoid solvent attack and perhaps mask flow marks or defects.
Paint must of course be matched to customer and applicator specifications, which sometimes restricts development possibilities. Becker Industrial Coatings assess all such constraints in advance to deliver the best products that can be swiftly introduced into production.
All these parameters — creative and practical — sit together in the colour stylist’s mind. Becker colour stylists are experienced in integrating the automotive designer’s demands to link internal colour selection with fabrics used, internal with external colours, shapes of parts with special effects. Through exchanges of words, sensations and feelings, truly creative colour emerges.
Beckers can also match colours with great accuracy, thanks to its excellent knowledge of pigments and effects available on the market.
Coating technology
Beckers is able to supply the full range of coatings used in the automotive industry for every type of plastic substrate — and for every type of application — conventional technologies (spraying) as well as IMC (in-mold coating).
Products include water borne and UV curing technology (which are increasingly replacing solvent borne technology), 1K or 2K primers, base coats, clear coats and topcoats.
All substrates including ABS, ABS-PC, PS, PP, PA, PE, PPO and their blends, as well as SMC & BMC, can be coated with the Beckers range of products.
Giving the best in both durability and aesthetics, the Beckers product range meets all the demands that plastic parts are subjected to in cars — internally or externally.
Becker Industrial Coatings' laboratories in each factory location will tailor exactly the right product for every requirement.
Beckers — durable colour for a world on the move